Hanson-Young defends pre-scripted questioning

Transcript

icon-plusicon-minus

TONY JONES, PRESENTER: The Commonwealth Ombudsman, Allan Asher, has resigned under government pressure after it emerged that he wrote questions for Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young to ask him in a Senate hearing. Well for her insights into what led to his resignation, I was joined by Sarah Hanson-Young just a short time ago. She was in our Parliament House studio.

TONY JONES: Now, Bob Brown calls this a political assassination, but if the Ombudsman's secret dealings with you raise questions about his independence and impartiality, he had to go, didn't he?

SARAH HANSON-YOUNG: Well, look, I think this is an absolute witch hunt on a very decent person who has stuck his neck out for the issues in relation to the crisis in Immigration detention facilities. He's very concerned about the mounting cases of long-term detention and the lack of his department to be able to review and carry out his job of these cases. This is a witch hunt by no other means but to remove this person because he was uncomfortable for the Government. Now, he ...

TONY JONES: Well I'll just interrupt you there, because he seems to be conceding himself that he crossed the line and possibly even damaged the reputation of the Ombudsman's office.

SARAH HANSON-YOUNG: Well, look, what the Ombudsman - how he's explained his actions is - I'll leave that for what he's put on the public record. But I know that he came to see me, raised serious concerns in relation to the cases mounting of long-term detention, the skyrocketing mental health issues, the hundreds of people on anti-depressants and anti-psychotic drugs, the numbers of people attempting suicide in detention centres and his inability, he believed, to be able to review these cases because of a lack of funding. And he said to me, "This is a serious concern. I need a way to put this on the record. I haven't been called to the Budget estimates committee like other people. I would like to come." And I said, "Well, I believe that this is important information. It should be on the public record." I was asked by the Ombudsman to keep it confidential because of the dealings that he had already had with the minister's office, which were somewhat frustrated and I would say quite negative interactions when you go back and have a look at the comments that have been made both publicly and privately. And I had to make a choice: do I continue the suppression of this information, as the minister would like, as the minister had done, or do I act in the public interest and put it out there? And so it's a decision that I had to make to say this was information that needed to be on the public record.

TONY JONES: OK. Do you believe that he, when speaking to you secretly, was fully aware of the dangers that he faced in doing that?

SARAH HANSON-YOUNG: I think he was very concerned at the relationship he already had with the Government. He made it pretty clear to me that he'd spoken to the minister several times about his issues. He'd written what he could publicly in reports and had been ignored, and that - this is a system that was fundamentally flawed. He believed that his job as a decent person in his role was to look after the very vulnerable people who had no other voice. And I think what we need to go to is remembering why the Ombudsman's office was given the role of independent oversight of detention centres and in particular cases.

TONY JONES: Well that happened - just to interrupt you there, that actually happened under the Howard government, didn't it? So, I mean, that is part of the broader context, so briefly explain it to us.

SARAH HANSON-YOUNG: That's right. That's absolutely right. In the early 2000s the cases such as Vivian Solon and Cornelia Rau and hundreds of others, over 200 other cases of wrongful detention, at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars to taxpayers these people were wrongfully detained. And when it all came to light there was a very strong push, both within government and outside government, to say the best way of avoiding this happening in the future is to give the Ombudsman, the Commonwealth Ombudsman a role at overseeing these facilities and reviewing peoples cases six months, 12 months, 18 months, two years, and being able to keep a check on how they were progressing because we knew we had wrongfully detained very vulnerable people at huge expense to the Australian taxpayer.

TONY JONES: OK. Well first of all explain why that six-month period was - how they decided upon that six-month period.

SARAH HANSON-YOUNG: Well the six-month period is really important when it comes to the mental health of these people. We know from psychiatric reports, from mental health experts, from all of the analysis that's done, that that six-month period is really detrimental. Once somebody has been detained for longer than that, their mental health deteriorates very quickly, their ability to engage in the process, to advocate their case, to speak with their case officers, to give credible information in helping to make a credible assessment of whether they indeed need protection or not is hindered once that six-month period and those mental health issues set in. That is why - that is why we need an independent person to review. And unfortunately and what Mr Asher has copped as a result of him sticking his neck out, is he was saying there's been skyrocketing numbers of people who have been held in detention for longer than six months. Over 65 per cent of all people in detention today have been there longer than six months. That's a huge caseload for his office to carry, and yet he didn't receive any extra support in terms of funding and resources to make sure he could continue to do his job properly.

TONY JONES: OK. Briefly, just go through the figures, because I know you have them. If there've been 65 per cent of the people who've been there for longer than six months in detention, what about 12 months and 18 months? Those longer periods.

SARAH HANSON-YOUNG: Over 36 per cent of people have been there for over 12 months. Over 10 per cent who have been there for over 18 months. And the critical point here is that the only report that is actually public to - that the Ombudsman writes in relation to these cases is anyone who's been there for over two years. All the other reviews are given to the minister as a bit of a warning sign, a check: "Hey, Minister, look, something's going on here." The two-year review is tabled in Parliament. And we're about to hit nearly 600 people - 590 people who have been there for either two months or only a couple of months off that.

TONY JONES: OK. Well, did the Ombudsman say to you in these private meetings that this was his primary concern? In other words, that he wasn't going to be able to do sufficiently or correctly do those reviews of these vast numbers of people who presumably he felt responsible for.

SARAH HANSON-YOUNG: That was absolutely at the crux of his concern and he reiterated that again this week in his statement to the estimates committee when being questioned by other senators. He said, "Let's not forget why this position was created. The idea of very vulnerable people slipping through the cracks, lost in the tangles of bureaucracy, the mistakes that government has made time and time again. Unless we have the resources to review their cases and do it thoroughly, we may very well risk another Vivian Solon, Cornelia Rau or the hundreds of other people who were wrongfully detained," and are still suffering as a result. There are children who were wrongfully detained under the Howard government who are now young adults and still suffer daily because of the trauma they received.

TONY JONES: OK. Let's go to what the Ombudsman told you though. Do you believe or did he actually tell you that he thought his job would be at risk if he went ahead, sought your assistance to have these questions asked and then put all this on the public record?

SARAH HANSON-YOUNG: He didn't say it that clearly, Tony. What he said was, "I have had time and time again tried to speak to the minister about these issues, raised these issues. I've done it in reports." He had sought out meetings with the minister and had subsequently been ignored and in fact believed that the relationship between the minister's office and his office was frustrated and not a very positive one. And the emails that were released over the last week show some of that, that there was building up frustration and a bullying almost, a silencing of dissent from the Immigration Minister's office to the Ombudsman's office, impeding his work.

TONY JONES: Did Mr Asher tell you, actually tell you, that he was being blocked by the minister's office from appearing before Senate hearings?

SARAH HANSON-YOUNG: He said that he had asked to appear and he wasn't called and he was concerned that he wasn't called. And he said he asked me to call him in front of the committee. And I made a decision: do I keep his confidence and do this and enable this very important information to go on the public record in the public interest, or do I do what the minister has done and continue to participate in the suppression of this information and silencing? Well, I don't believe that that's the right thing to do. If I was confronted with this issue again, I would put this information on the public record, as the Ombudsman wanted it to be.

TONY JONES: Do you feel at all responsible for Mr Asher's demise or are these sort of behind-the-scenes dealings between you and him actually a typical part of the political process, the game-playing that goes on in these kind of hearings?

SARAH HANSON-YOUNG: I think all you need to do is watch Question Time in the House or the Senate, and on a daily basis you have backbenchers reading out handwritten questions to the minister written by the minister on a daily basis, in Senate committees.

TONY JONES: Yes, but to be fair, this is an independent advocate who's meant to be independent of the political process, including independent of the Greens, the Government, the Opposition; he's meant to be plotting his own course and yet he appears to have been very close to your position.

SARAH HANSON-YOUNG: Well, look, I think if the only crime that he has committed is putting in writing the concerns he wants to be able to raise in a public forum because he believed that they had been suppressed, well, I think that is a decent thing for a person who desperately believes his job, most importantly than all, is to ensure that he looks after the cases that come across his desk and has the resources to do that. The issues in immigration detention are chaotic. The skyrocketing suicide rates - there was a man on the roof of the Darwin detention centre last night who attempted to hang himself and had to be dragged down by his fellow detainees. And that's - this is happening on a daily basis. Long-term detention is creating this problem. The minister doesn't want to hear about it. He didn't want to hear about it from Mr Asher; he doesn't want to hear about it from the Greens; he doesn't want to hear about it being - he doesn't want to hear it being spoken about in the media. This is a ...

TONY JONES: OK - alright, go ahead. No, finish that.

SARAH HANSON-YOUNG: This is absolutely punishment for Mr Asher for sticking up his head, doing his job and advocating for the very independence of the reviews that he is meant to conduct. If you wanted to silence one of your critics, if you wanted to shut down the ability of an independent reviewer to not do their job, to not embarrass you, you would cut their funding, and that's what we've seen.

TONY JONES: If you had been more subtle with your questioning, if you'd made your questions distant in some way from the ones that he sent you in that email, could you have protected him?

SARAH HANSON-YOUNG: Look, I think it's - the questions that I asked were important to be put. I believed that - and I still fundamentally believe this was information that had to be on the public record. I think ...

TONY JONES: But do you regret at all the way you put the questions, because when you look at the email and the questions side by side, it looks simply like collusion?

SARAH HANSON-YOUNG: I don't regret it, Tony. I was confronted with an option and I think it's pretty naive to think that politicians aren't confronted with these options on a daily basis. You get information and you make a choice: is this information that should be in the public record or is it not? I made the decision that it was. I firmly believe it was. Mr Asher believed that it was. And it's - the issue here is why did he have to go through this process? And one of the things that the Greens have said this week and one of the things we will continue to do is move for reform to enable a parliamentary committee to oversee the activities of the Ombudsman so that he can automatically be able to put to Parliament these issues, these concerns, and that there is some oversight. Because it was put to me today, and I think this is a question that's worth considering: the independent Ombudsman has all these roles to review executive government and review government agencies, but his funding and his access to the Parliament is at the behest of the executive government. So, let's actually try and do something to reform this system so this doesn't have to happen like this. In New South Wales even, the Ombudsman there has a Parliamentary committee that can oversee the activities so that the Ombudsman can come to them and say, "Look, this is what's going on, this is what I'm working on." In New Zealand, in Britain, in South Africa even, in Thailand, this is how the Ombudsman's positions are managed, and I think that's something we should be looking at. The Greens will put forward legislation to do that. And if the Prime Minister and Tony Abbott are serious about their concerns of how this happened, well let's see this legislation move swiftly through the Parliament to fix it.

TONY JONES: Have you spoken to Mr Asher since his resignation?

SARAH HANSON-YOUNG: No, I haven't, I haven't, and ...

TONY JONES: Why not?

SARAH HANSON-YOUNG: Well, because I think he's probably - he's probably got better things on his mind than to speak to me. I'm sure he's wondering what's going on and what he's going to do for the next couple of weeks and the years to come. I think this is a really - been a really sad day for how the independent Ombudsman, who has stuck his neck out, asked some uneasy questions of government, expected some response, done his job, has been hounded and copped it because of a witch hunt because the minister and the Government didn't want to have to hear what he said.

TONY JONES: And very briefly, none of this threatens in any way your arrangement, your regular arrangement and alliance with the Government?

SARAH HANSON-YOUNG: Well, look, I'm sure it's something that - this particular issue will be something that we continue to discuss. I've said that the Greens want to see legislation in the Parliament to fix the process here and that'll be something we take up with government.

TONY JONES: Sarah Hanson-Young, we'll have to leave you there. We thank you very much for joining us.